Aung San Suu Kyi (12 page)

Most assertive in their demands for independence were the Karenni people. They had been very close to the colonial power and understood that the British had promised them their own state. On September 11, 1946, one local Karenni leader had appointed a government for the “United Karenni States.” Other Karenni leaders had reinforced their arsenals, and if it proved necessary for achieving independence they were now ready for war.

The developments in the Rakhine state in western Burma were just as explosive. There the Buddhist monk U Sein Da had assembled a guerrilla army to restore the old Rakhine Kingdom. At the same time a Muslim guerrilla force had been created to defend the Rohyinga people's rights against U Sein Da's soldiers. The Muslims and the Buddhists had lived side by side for centuries in the region, but that unity was now in the process of cracking.

The Karens were also dubious about becoming members of the new union. The war had deepened their historical distrust of the Bamar. They even sent a delegation of their own to London in the hopes that Attlee would give them an agreement similar to the one Aung San had been given. However, the government in London had decided to stake everything on Aung San, and the Karen delegation did not get to meet any important civil servants or politicians. During some painful days in the British capital, they were shown the various cultural and historical sights.

Several days before the meeting in Panglong, the Karen National Union (KNU) had been formed. The Karens were totally focused on independence and were present in Panglong purely as observers.

Aung San laid all his political prestige on the line and succeeded in persuading the representatives for the Chin, Kachin, and Shan peoples to sign an agreement about becoming members of the new union. The Shan princes were given a special clause giving them the right to secede from the union after ten years if they were not satisfied with the cooperation. The same right was given to the Karenni.

There were still many loose ends, but the success in Panglong demonstrated that Aung San's plan for progress was watertight. In April, Burma's first democratic elections were held and the AFPFL won a walkover. The elections were indeed boycotted by both the “red” and the “white” communists, and
likewise by the Karens in KNU, but the election victory nonetheless legitimized Aung San's leadership. He was on his way to becoming independent Burma's first democratically elected prime minister.

He would have attained that post, if it had not been for those shots at the Secretariat.

The Secretariat is a redbrick building covering almost an entire block in an area near the port of Rangoon. It is surrounded by a high brick wall with barbed wire along the top, and an overgrown garden. Its windows look emptily out in the direction of the shabby center of Rangoon, but although having been abandoned, it is watched day and night by armed guards. In 1947, it was a building completely open to all. Despite Rangoon being the capital for Burma's government-to-be, despite the sensitive negotiations with the ethnic groups, and despite the existence of infinite numbers of weapons in circulation after the war, security around those who were to constitute the new leadership of the country had not been reinforced. Aung San was utterly unprotected.

On the morning of July 19, Aung San did the same as he did most mornings during those hectic months in 1947. He awoke at 5 a.m. in the family's house on Tower Lane. It was situated on a verdant hill in a wealthy residential area just north of Lake Kandawgyi. The two-story house was built in a colonial style with a white-plastered tower, and it was completely surrounded by a white stone wall.

Aung San ate a breakfast consisting of noodles and drank a cup of tea, and then he hugged his three children before walking out to the waiting official car that would take him to the Secretariat. During the morning he was to spend a couple of hours on administrative tasks before meeting his government cabinet at half past ten. Some of the most promising politicians of the day were members of the government, and Aung San had consciously chosen several representatives from the ethnic minorities, for example the Karen leader Mahn Ba Khaing and Hsam Htun, one of the princes from the Shan people. Normally, the government gathered in the British governor's office, but on this particular day there was nothing on the agenda that warranted the attendance of the governor.

It seemed to be a regular working day, but the politician U Saw had other plans. On his command a group of soldiers was on its way to the Secretariat.
U Saw had been planning the attack for months. Thoughts of revenge had taken root as early as when Governor Rance had allowed Aung San and the AFPFL to gain a majority in the interim government. U Saw understood himself to be the rightful leader of the nationalist movement. He was older and had more experience than Aung San. He did not like Aung San's left-wing views, and some months earlier he himself had been the target of an attempted murder. He was certain that Aung San was the person behind it. (Nobody has been able to prove it.)

The vehicle with the armed men drove fast southward through the chaotic network of Rangoon's roads. It passed street markets, pagodas, English cars, and ox wagons from the countryside around the capital. Nobody stopped the vehicle when it drove into the courtyard of the Secretariat, and the armed men were able to make their way up to the second floor, where the interim government had just assembled, without any problem. They fatally shot a guard posted outside the meeting room, and then they jerked open the door and opened fire. Aung San had risen as soon as the first shot was fired; he was immediately hit by thirteen bullets. Six other ministers were also executed. Among them were Mahn Ba Khain and Hsam Htun, along with Aung San's brother U Ba Win. It later turned out that a number of British officers had delivered the weapons used in the attack, but the matter was never properly investigated and U Saw had to bear the entire blame for the murders.

One of the most eminent nationalist leaders in Southeast Asia no longer existed. Aung San had only reached the age of thirtytwo. He died at 10:37 a.m. on July 19, 1947, a day that is still ceremoniously held as the Day of the Martyrs in Burma. He had made a remarkable journey from the dusty streets of his childhood in Natmauk to the university and the struggle for independence. Along the way he had not only conquered his own antisocial characteristics, but this oddity of a man had become a national hero.

“He was an intuitive intellectual,” said Professor Khynt Maung at the University of Rangoon a long time afterward, in an interview with Angelene Naw, “and at the same time he could be totally undisciplined. I knew him well and I knew many people who worked with him and some of them said he was extremely rude and unpredictable. But of course, he was a genius so people accepted his idiosyncratic manners.”

It is impossible to know how Aung San would have tackled the difficulties that Burma was faced with during the 1950s. Civil war broke out only a few months after the formal independence in January 1948. The Karens took up arms, as did the communists. And during the 1950s, the Union of Burma cracked little by little, until the end of democracy in 1962. Perhaps Aung San, with his strong winning instinct and his “independence at any price” mentality might have been just as brutal and violent as the generals who later came to power. Or else he might have been able to stop the breakdown thanks to his diplomatic capacity and the strong confidence he enjoyed among the ethnic minorities. One often hears that view in the Burma of today, where it is said that the murders at the Secretariat meant a death sentence for the whole of the democratic promise that independence and the new constitution brought with them.

U Saw's dream of becoming the country's first prime minister was already dashed the afternoon after the murders. He was arrested, condemned to death for murder and treason, and hanged in May 1948.

Instead it was U Nu who took over as prime minister. He had followed on the heels of Aung San during all the years they were students together, via the Thakin movement and out into the war. But when independence was within reach, he had withdrawn from public life into a monastery. He was a wise leader, considerate and reasoning, and he had been the vice chairman of the AFPFL. However, as a candidate, he was not at all the unifying force that the country needed when it was balancing between stability and chaos. U Nu was not accorded the same confidence by the ethnic minorities and—perhaps most important of all—he did not have the same support from the army. Aung San was understood to be its founder, and with him gone, there was nobody who was able or willing to control the destructive power of the armed forces.

Critics sometimes accuse Aung San Suu Kyi of being obsessed with her father. What they are implicitly driving at is that she is not a popular leader in her own right; she is totally dependent on Aung San's status as a national hero. This is of course true in the sense that she became famous and rapidly gained a political position because she is his daughter. If she had not had this relationship, then she would not have held that speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda in 1988 and she would not have become a symbol for the democratic movement in the same way.

It is also true that a significant proportion of her own texts and speeches have often revolved around her father. Even before her return to Burma in 1988, she had published
Aung San of Burma
, an outline of his life in which she gives prominence to his good aspects and glosses rather too glibly over his faults and transgressions. She writes only briefly about the accusations against him of murder and nothing at all about his flirtation with totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s. Even Peter Carey, one of her and Michael's friends in Oxford, says that she had “the uncritical and admiring attitude of a daughter to her father.”

But obsessed? She has always forcefully rejected that allegation: “I don't think about my father every day. I'm not obsessed by him, as some people seem to think. I prefer to believe that my attitude to him is based on healthy
respect and admiration, not obsession,” as she said in an interview with Alan Clements.

Of course, the accusation of obsession is really about something else. It is in the interests of the junta to discredit Aung San Suu Kyi, and therefore they are trying to spread the image of her as someone who has nothing worth saying. That she is just being nostalgic, living on and exploiting her father's greatness.

It is particularly strange if one considers that almost everyone in Burma has regarded Aung San as a hero—the military and the democratic movement alike, the country's political elite as well as the ordinary people in the streets. His picture has been put up everywhere, in teahouses, in officers' barracks, and in the offices of the NLD. Streets, markets, and whole blocks have been named after him. In more recent years, however, the junta have been less keen to promote him as an example, well aware that people always think about Aung San Suu Kyi when they see pictures of her father.

Aung San Suu Kyi's possible obsession does not differ much from that of the average Burmese. Basically, it is a battle about historiography. Ever since Ne Win seized power in 1962, the junta's propaganda has drawn a straight line between the national hero Aung San and dictatorship. Aung San's founding of the army and the army's liberation of the country from the colonial powers have been used to justify military rule, as well as implicitly give the generals the right to interpret reality and an eternal right to rule the country.

By invoking her father and pointing to her own connections to the liberation of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has torn this argument out of the junta's hands. She has cut loose and shown that the oppression established by the junta is not at all the natural continuation of the state that Aung San sketched in the 1940s. By calling the great popular protests during 1988 “the second struggle for independence,” she instead links the opposition and the democratic movement to the struggle for liberation. In that sense, her appearance at Shwedagon was the starting point for a revision of the inheritance from Aung San and the anticolonial struggle.

However, 1988 was also the starting point for a year of intensive election work. Only a few weeks after Saw Maung's and the new junta's seizure of power, Aung San Suu Kyi became one of the founders of a political party, the National League for Democracy. U Tin Oo, the former commander in
chief who had ended up in a conflict with the junta in the 1970s, was chosen as the party chairman. Aung San Suu Kyi was the general secretary.

The new junta, the SLORC, had sent out a message that the elections would be held some time during 1990, which meant that the NLD had between one and two years at its disposal in which to carry out an election campaign. After 1962, Ne Win had banned all parties except Burma's socialist party, the BSPP, whose central committee had been more powerful than the country's formal government. When the SLORC took over after the BSPP in 1988, they promised that the one-party state would be abolished and that promise gave rise to enormous activity in civilian society. New parties sprouted like mushrooms out of the ground, and within a couple of months more than two hundred new parties had been registered. Scarcely one hundred of them were later authorized by the junta and actually allowed to participate in the elections.

The junta had given all the new parties the right to use the telephone (which was far from self-evident in Burma in 1988), and they had been given special rations of gasoline so that they could travel around the country. The junta had also started a new party, the National Unity Party (NUP), which replaced Burma's socialist party. Saw Maung saw to it that all the parties that allied themselves with the NUP were able to run their election campaigns with money from the state, while all the SLORC's critics had to manage as best they could. Throughout the entire election campaign the generals refused to meet the representatives of the opposition in debates or in order to make clear which rules were to apply for the election process. “There are more than one hundred political parties. Which one of them are we supposed to meet?” they asked rhetorically. Then Aung San Suu Kyi suggested that the opposition should choose one representative in common, and at a meeting in Rangoon the 104 different parties united in choosing Aung San Suu Kyi to represent the assembled opposition in talks with the junta.